Detroit Pistons score late victory over Toronto Raptors in game with draft lottery implications

AP PhotoToronto Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan dunks, en route to a 16-point game, but the Detroit Pistons came out with the 76-73 win.

AUBURN HILLS – The Detroit
Pistons won a game, the nature of which some fans would just as soon
see them lose.

If that's in their character, it's
something head coach Lawrence Frank doesn't want to see.

The Pistons beat the Toronto
Raptors 76-73 Sunday at The Palace of Auburn Hills. For draft
lottery implications, it was precisely the kind of game that could
help their lottery positioning if they had lost.

Instead, Ben Gordon scored 15
points in the fourth quarter, combined with Brandon Knight to score
16 consecutive Pistons points at one point – they both finished
with 19 for the game – and pushed Detroit two games ahead of
Toronto with two games apiece left.

Detroit (24-40) also won two out
of three games in the season series and will enter the draft lottery
with fewer combinations of ping-pong balls than the Raptors (22-42).

The Pistons are guaranteed to
enter the lottery with no worse than the ninth-most combinations.

The Pistons play Monday night at
Indiana, then play their regular-season finale Thursday here against
Philadelphia.

After their lowest-scoring half of
the year in the first half Sunday, this wouldn't have been the
performance they wanted remembered as their last at home,
particularly if they had lost.

Gordon saw to that in his
productive fourth quarter, when he was 4 of 6 from the floor and 6 of
8 from the line.

He converted two natural
three-point plays in the first six minutes of the fourth quarter, one
to give the Pistons a one-point lead, the other to bring them back within
66-65 with 6:12 left.

That would be the last time the
Pistons trailed.

Brandon Knight hit three free
throws in a pair of trips to the line. After an Ed Davis dunk tied
the game 68-68, Gordon hit a 3-pointer, then a free throw on the next
possession, and the Pistons retained the lead the rest of the way.

They led 74-73 when Alan
Anderson's drive was caught in mid-air – but not ruled a goaltend –
and Rodney Stuckey extended the lead by a point by splitting two free
throws with 17.1 seconds left.

Anderson missed a 3-pointer with
8.9 seconds left, Gordon pushed the advantage to 76-73 by splitting a
pair of free throws, and a Linas Kleiza 3-pointer at the buzzer
rimmed out.

The Pistons trailed 34-29 after
scoring their fewest points in a half all season. The 63 total
points also were the fewest scored in the half of a Pistons game this
season. It also marked the first time this season that the Pistons
and their opponents played a half without either team managing a
20-point quarter.

Detroit shot 27 percent (10 of 37)
in a first half when one of the few attractive statistics was Greg
Monroe grabbing the largest number of the bountiful rebounds, 10.